The Insane Root
The Mystic Mandrake. By C. J. S. Thompson. (Rider. 15s.) As lately as 1916 a labourer at Headington, near Oxford, dug up a root which he believed to be a mandrake ; and the drawing of it provided by Mr. Thompson gives him every excuse. How often " the mystic root " so closely resembles the human form is impossible to conjecture, but if one in every hundred came so near, we need not wonder at one of the widespread and obstinate legends in history.
" And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth. . . ."
Most people's acquaintance with the legend is covered by this and by Iago's reference. Yet even these, alluding to two features among dozens, are incomplete. The root had many medicinal virtues besides that of an opiate : the uprooting was not only noisy, but required a definite ritual. Of many accounts quoted by Mr. Thompson, the following is a fair sample : " Go to the gallows hill on a Friday evening before the sun has set, having stopped your ears with was or pitch, taking with you a black dog that has no patch of white on his body. When you come to the plant, make three crosses over it and dig the soil away round its roots till they remain to the earth by a few slender fibres. Now, bring up the black dog, take a string and tie one and of the string to the animal's tad and the other end to the mandrake.
Next, hold out a piece of bread taking care to keep it beyond its reach and retreating rapidly as you do so. In its eagerness to snatch the bread, the dog will strain and tug at the string and thus wrench the mandrake out of the ground. At the awful yell which the plant utters in the process, the dog drops dead to the .ground. _
Then pick up the plant, wash it clean in red wine, wrap it in white and red silk and lay it in a casket. But you must not forget to bathe it every Friday and to give it a new shirt every new moon."
The gallows location is optional, and there are many variants, such as the drawing of magic circles round the plant, facing west, stopping up the ears, or blowing a blast upon a horn : but in essentials the 'ritual remained the same for centuries. The mandrake crops up almost everywhere. The ancient Hebrews valued it as a cure for sterility, and belief in its efficacy is said still to persist among orthodox Jews in America. The Egyptians had a, high opinion of its qualities, making it the main ingredient in their elixir of life, and crediting it with various magical powers, In one of their accounts appears what is probably the first reference to the root's peculiar shape. The idea that the uprooting involved danger is many times expressed in Greek literature, An illustration to a sixth-century manuscript of Dioscorides shows that the practice_ oL using a dog in self-protection ; bad. taken-hokI, The fast at tud mention of a deg is given
by Josephus, in his account of the plant baaras, which Mr. Thompson from its properties thinks to belong to the species of mandragora. Pliny refers to the danger, in purely medical terms :
" Persons ignorant of its properties are apt to be struck dumb by the odour of this plant when in_ excess, and too strong, a dose of the juice is productive of fatal results'' ;
but he does not appear to know anything about the use of dogs. The Herbarium of an eleventh-century leech, trans- lated into Anglo-Saxon, gives elaborate directions for up- rooting. A hundred years later, it is the cry of the mandrake that is dangerous, rather than the smelt. From theri on belief in the legend became practically universal. The human resemblance was accentuated by skilful carvers, till the artificial mandrake became more popular than the real as a talisman both in love and business. Jeanne d'Arc was accused of carrying a mandrake mannikin in her bosom. She replied that
"`she did not know what a mandrake was. She had never had one, but she had heard say there was one near her town, though she had never seen it. She had been told that a mandrake was a dangerous thing and difficult to keep. She did not know what it was used for.' When questioned about the particular mandrake which she admitted to have heard: about, she answered that she had been told it was in the ground under a hazel-tree, but the exact spot she did not know.' Asked as to the use to which a mandrake is put, she replied that. she had heard that it caused money to come, but that she did not believe it, and the voices that spoke to her had never said anything to her on the subject.' "
The superstition had its grimmer side :
" In 1603 a woman named Margaret Ragum Bouchory, the wife of a Moor, was hanged as a witch at Romorantin near Orleans, on being convicted•of having kept and fed a living mandrake fiend which was stated to be in the form of a female ape."
Mr. Thompson's style is sometimes odd, as if infected by some of the ancient manuscripts he has transcribed, but tfiere can be no doubt as to the care and= pains with which he has compiled this unusually interesting book.
L. A. G. STRONG.
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